New York-based Ruby Sky Stiler and Sara Greenberger Rafferty will present new work at The Suburban this Spring. Continuing her series of relief wall sculptures – as well as an interrogation of modes of display – Stiler has devised an installation rail system to highlight the object-quality of works that are already in strong dialogue with a painting language. Stiler “strives for the object to be conflicted in its periodization, and incorporates multiple references [creating the feeling of something] both familiar and alien.”1 Her peculiar form of relief patchwork has become more fractured here, emphasizing seamed construction and illusion simultaneously. The appearance of color invokes both the palette of Cubist collage and also make-up, so that some of the recognizable facial features appear even to be blushing.

Rafferty’s installation takes on the original Suburban gallery as an allegorical studio space. Replete with artist working, light kit, ladder, giant copy stand, and objects to be photographed – the work takes a half turn away from trompe l’oeil and toward a conflation and confusion of two and three dimensional space. The single performer, usually a comedian in her work, is now a silhouetted art-worker confined to a shelf attached to the wall. In a second piece, installed on the patch of grass between the gallery building and the Grabner/Killam residence, comedic props rendered in Plexiglas are installed as if they are giant game pieces from the game Clue.

Ruby and Sara have produced a collaborative silkscreen poster announcing the projects’ openings.